The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
--- Winston Churchill

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Stimulatin' the Economy

We spent the entire morning spending money from the comfort of our apartment; Debbie was putting in her quarterly Stampin' Up order and I was going crazy on Amazon buying geek stuff. The bulk of my order was a second Drobo and a pair of 2TB drives to plop into it, plus some new drives to use for backup now that I've blown way past what will fit on my existing external backup drive. When it's all set up, I should have around 3.5TB of on-line drive space (not including whatever is in the computer; I only use that for software). Which should last me for a bit. Anyone remember when a 1GB drive seemed like retched excess? When a 1TB drive was essentially infinite? It's mostly video files taking up the current 1.5TB of space; everything else totals less than 100GB. And by "everything else" I mean every single computer file I have ever created including those where the software capable of reading those files is long gone. (Ya never know when you might need to look back at some COBOL code you wrote in the 1980's.) But it is sooooo convenient to have everything in on-line storage. And much smaller as well; we'd need a couple hundred feet of shelf space for all the movies and music we have as digital files. When you're an apartment-dweller that moves every couple years, that becomes a prime consideration.

As Debbie mentioned in her post, we're still in hurry-up-and-wait mode on the what-state-will-we-live-in-this-year front. Tomorrow will firm up some decisions; everyone keep fingers and toes crossed. We want to make sure we have enough time to really look around for a place to live this time. We ended up being rushed when we came out here looking for an apartment. Not that it would have made much difference in terms of us staying here, but we're hoping to make this move stick for a little while longer than the last three or four, so we want to spend at least a week on the apartment shopping gig.

Hulu is starting a test of its subscription service. I cannot imagine that the local affiliates are going to be excited about being cut out of the loop again, but $10/month sound about right assuming that that covers all shows on the various networks that are part of this deal and the ads go away. Of course, the same amount of money gets you the orders-of-magnitude larger Netflix catalog of movies and TV shows. (With a longer delay for TV shows, but does that really matter to anyone over the age of 18?) I don't expect this to be anywhere near the big deal the article's author thinks it will be, but it is certainly yet-another step in the direction that content has been heading in for a long time.

Another article about census scofflaws complete with a sexual innuendo embedded in the URL. The interesting part isn't the yet-another incompetent doing everything they can think of to hide their incompetence storyline, but the attitude of the bureaucrats:

The Census bureau was not able to estimate how much it will cost to redo all the work, but a spokesman said it was not an issue because the bureau was under budget on the massive project.

[Emphasis mine.]

First of all, the final tally for the 2010 census is expected to be nearly four times the cost of the 2000 census, so saying you're still "under budget" isn't really big points in your favor. Second, waste and fraud is always "an issue" Mr. Census Spokesman.

Police in El Reno, Oklahoma tasered a bed-ridden, 86-year-old, schizophrenic woman for an "aggressive" gesture with a kitchen knife. Twice, because they were too incompetent to be able to properly taze a bed-ridden person in one shot. There were at least 10 cops present, but this was the only response they could think of to deal with a frail, nutty old woman. Are police departments now recruiting in federal prisons? Of course, there was no wrong-doing and all procedures were followed.

An old women on oxygen died not too far from here because the power company shut off her power. Again, note the defense: All the proper procedures were followed. All the paperwork was in order. It must have been the old couple's fault; it seems their medical notice to the power company stating that the power could not be shut off may have lapsed.

Well, off to do research on our likely destination: Lake Mary, Florida.